Ubuntu-Chicago went great this week, and we all had a blast. Still, there was one thing left unresolved, which I will address with a gimp image:

For all those people who run gnome, are really smart, and got left out, I apologize in advance. Also you can click the image to see it in a larger version!

Update: This is just a very light-hearted joke just because we go back and forth with “oh that would work if it was in KDE” etc.  I am desktop environment neutral and infact maintain a 1400 system install of KDE, and it works great

Got back from Ubuntu Chicago today, we had a great turn out and a lot of fun.  One thing that is a bit scary though is that we have a lot of people on dapper, and they want to move to edgy.  Unfortunately, people trying to upgrade their systems are running into tons of errors, and just giving up and leaving disappointed.  I know that dapper is the stable, LTS release, but maybe having a few systems to test the upgrade might not be a bad idea.  One reference point: ubuntu forums

Generally I write things off like that, since they are very sparse on specifics and don’t leave me much of an option to give them a helping hand, but I am seeing a lot of these posts, from blogs, forums and irc.  Personally my own problems upgrading with the python changes lead me to believe they are actually valid problems.

For those who don’t feel like reading the above, summary: What is the migration strategy and testing procedure? 

I am giving a short talk tomorrow @ the chicago group on 3d game programming, and the author of this book, Gregory Junker, was kind enough to provide a signed copy for one lucky person who can answer my simple c or c++ question during the presentation

Points of interest, that are new to me:

• Ever seen the mac switch adds? This post is dying to be one for ubuntu
  
• Ubuntu Clips launched, wants to store videos of people using Ubuntu
• If your system told you to upgrade, like this guy, and you found yourself in edgy, no it wasn’t released, it was a bug
• Mark lays out some notes on planning for 7.04 – the fiesty fawn
• Gaim 2.0.0 Beta 4 has been released. This one gives us some new features, including gaim talking to network-manager
• Debian admin has a guide, with screen shots, on making a ubuntu LAMP server

And last, but certainly not least, the Chicago loco team is meeting on the 28th. Be there, or be totally not cool. If you already are totally not cool, then what is there to lose?

 Update: Also Edgy RC1 has been released.  Get it. Test it.

So the day has finally arrived, we have a flash 9 beta.  Probably not recommended for most users, but if you are like me, you have been dying for this.

• Step 1
• Download the flashplayer 9 archive: click here
• Step 2
• From the command line run:
• tar xvfz FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
• Step 3
• Copy the plugin to the plugins directory
• cd flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55/
• sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
• Step 4
• Restart browser and visit the previously forbidden sites

Disclaimer: As per comments on my previous posts, almost everything I explain how to do on my blog is not “correct” and may blow up your system.  It is not the proper way, apt won’t know about it, and you may lose your first born.  Good luck.

Was reading slashdot today, and saw that Vista won’t let users run it on VMs, and only move it to another device once. That is one thing Ubuntu won’t ask you to do.

For those of you out there running edgy that haven’t been able to find a solution to this:

Linking and byte-compiling packages for runtime python2.4…
Traceback (most recent call last): File “/usr/bin/pycentral”, line 1325, in ? main()
File “/usr/bin/pycentral”, line 1319, in main rv = action.run(global_options)
File “/usr/bin/pycentral”, line 954, in run requested = list(pyversions.requested_versions(vstring, version_only=True))
File “/usr/share/python/pyversions.py”, line 113, in requested_versions raise ValueError, ‘empty set of versions’
ValueError: empty set of versions dpkg: error processing python2.4-minimal (–configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

then I have the answer! Just run:

sudo dpkg -P –force-all python2.4
sudo dpkg -P –force-all python-central
sudo apt-get -f install

If you need to match an http address in python that may or may not have http, here it is (thanks for nothing #python!):

a = re.compile(r"(http://)?(?P[^/]+)(/)?")

I really don’t want to give too much credit to a site which generates most of it’s traffic from very non-rational arguments, but this site has a link to an article about Ubuntu hurting innovation. A little more disturbing is some of the comments on the article, such as this gem by a fellow named manmist: “Note that Ubuntu ships and installs proprietary drivers by default without giving users a choice. “ and he continues “This is worse than Freespire which atleast has a OSS edition.”

I think it is important to note that Ubuntu sources are available, provided you setup the sources.list properly, by a simple apt-get source packagename. If you need the sources offline, these cds are available on request also. As for the binary drivers bit, from what I can tell no proprietary driver is installed by default if an open alternative exists. Why anyone would just want their hardware to straight up not work is beyond me?

For a related story in my real life experience, I have a Prism54 card. This card works great under Ubuntu, and any version of Linux provided you have the firmware for it. Ubuntu has this by default. I heard all the rage about how cool SLED 10 was on planet gnome, so I gave it a spin. SLED didn’t have my firmware by default, and being that wireless was my only internet connection at the time, I was unable to do anything at all on my system.